Say Hello To Your Competition

Yes, they bite, and that’s when they’re just being friendly. It’s true: the majority of your competitors would derive pleasure at seeing your business’s guts ripped out all over the road in their rear view mirror at the first opportunity and would laugh themselves all the way to the bank or just back to the office as the case may be, just as you would them, right? Well, am I right or are you really that much different than your competition? Put another way, what type of “wounding” does your value system allow, assuming that you have one, and are you violating the slightest of your values by the way you currently “bite” to compete? Taking another perspective, is there a way to compete successfully and obtain the effect of a “bite” while keeping high-road values intact? Absolutely. Just take your focus off low-blow biting and focus your time, talent and energy on getting a grip on the 3 Vs: Value, Visibility and Viability.

Value speaks for itself. Value must reside in your product and should equally and consistently reside within your service delivery of the product if you are to be even a candidate for success. It is not unusual for business to deceive themselves as to the true element of value in their product. This deception often occurs by default as a result of faulty improper analysis of their market and product. Needless to say (or is it?) they rarely acquire any customers or their base is limited to a few close and equally gullible or sympathetic “friends”. Constantly work to improve your product and service delivery of your product. Do on point and aggressive analysis of current market trends, strive to broaden your horizons by developing insight into current and projected market trends and apportion your energy smartly, viewing it as the rare and precious commodity it is. And don’t confuse intelligent work with staying or looking “busy”. Most companies stay and look “busy” enough, but busyness doesn’t equate to “building”. Moreover, unfettered and unfocused busyness with non-essentials and ill focus can effect the gentlest yet most fatal blow a company could ever inflict on itself.

Visibility requires a blended balance of marketing strategies including SEO and a balanced array of other techniques so your market (and potential market) can “see” your presence through the least possible effort and on a consistent, reoccurring basis so that familiarity may lend itself to comfort. Maintaining market visibility is proportionately challenging based on budget yet this can be a call for your creativity to fully engage effective juice. Choosing an effective brandable domain name provides a solid baseline from which to succeed and a great domain name is the most controllable and obvious way to protect your business investment because a memorable domain name will empower the balance of your business strategies to achieve optimal market effect, whereas having a “difficult” domain name or improper fit can create significant “drag” on your brand and marketing systems and effectively pull back the reins on profit. Regardless of how you become visible, the fact remains that to reach your market you must become visible. This requires staying on top of the current shifts in marketing trends and by engaging a solid and comprehensive marketing base to obtain that visibility. If you have to go out literally, from door to door, and shake hands with every one of your prospects in order to gain visibility, then like it or not, you should do it. And don’t forget those old fashioned business cards! It’s an irreplaceable marketing medium and tangible lasting “business ambassador” that could well wind up in multiple hands before its useful life is through! The internet offers a plethora of avenues in which to build your visibility but the key is to choose methods which are most efficient and suited to your current business model and market and then to place your capital eggs carefully and with great forethought into those particular mechanisms to get you the most effective results. So do your homework and make sure insight goes into every effort because business success is not a free lunch.

Viability has to do with the “Personal Relationship Factor” you build with your community and market which is composed of the trust and likability factor for which there is absolutely no substitute. Who wants to buy widgets from old man scrooge when sweet little Annie or George just down the road sells the very same ones for just a few pennies more? Like when Jerry Maguire’s old school but highly successful mentor earnestly, simply and profoundly explained to Jerry the secret to building a business, he summed it up clearly as follows: “It’s all about personal relationships.” We couldn’t agree more.

All the 3 Vs demand your uttermost focus and dedication to achieve harmonious effect. Mastering 2 out of 3 just won’t do.

Now back to Competitors. Competitors bite because it’s their nature to bite and wounding you reaps proportionate kudos for them, or so they think. Several noteworthy ironies penetrate this commonplace premise. First, many businesses, including those low-road tactic companies, are so busy wounding themselves, either directly or indirectly, by action or, more often, by lack of it, that they are literally incapable or unmotivated to wound their competition effectively. Ironically, this fact is only potentially beneficial to those target-companies who have ceased wounding themselves and are in a position to reap “potential” good from their ill-spirited competitor’s attacks. As such, just because your competitors slide off base through self-inflicted or received wounds does not necessarily increase the market’s perception of your business or product, unless you are the only game left in town and assuredly you are not unless you’ve just taken hold of the last golden egg.

To posture yourself to rise in the marketplace, your focus should include “personalized involvement”, networking and communication within not only your immediate and known market but crusading through various multimedia channels and beyond your comfort zone of known market toward the outermost extremities of the world in an effort to shake hands, figuratively or literally, with everyone you can. Ladies and gentlemen, please permit me an analogy of husband and bride as I employ it with all due respect: Consider your market your bride. It is your job to romance and woo her under the balcony of her choice, swoon her with chocolates and flowers, offer her a proposition of perceived long-term value and then, when the moment is right, to look directly into her eyes and to offer her a “diamond ring” (offer) she just can’t refuse. Keep in mind, there are tons of hungry business Romeos like yourself, and yes, even more experienced and savvy, flooding the foyers and stairs. And with the advent of niche splintering, specialized services and yes, increasing competition, prospects are becoming less and less. But don’t despair. Instead, consider the challenge a golden opportunity for you to go to work on your business.

Secondly, many companies built on the rock of the scarcity mentality are, with rare exception, built also on the side-rock of low-road tactics. These companies frequently employ hyper-aggression, judgment, guilt and stick-and-carrot methodologies within their ranks which effectively handicaps inner-rank vision and subsidizes requisite inspiration with forced and impotent tongue-in-cheek cooperation. More often than not, these companies ultimately fail inasmuch as through the employment of self-defeating mechanisms they have capped their potential growth. These companies are easily spotted due to the various grab tactics they employ, ironically enough, without much effect. They are to be likened to a frenzied shopper at a white sale, pushing and shoving their way to the goods or a gain with patent disregard for their “neighbors” which ultimately reveals the same disregard for their clients. Many of these companies, initially founded on a marketing “vision” of offering some optimal value product by founders whose psyches are rooted in the scarcity mentality, employ by nature compatible sub-systems to achieve their true aim, which is not to bolster the envisioned product or provide impeccable service to the customer, but rather to create and implement scarcity-based sub-systems that serve to compliment and reinforce the negative belief system on which the company was truly founded. As such, these duplicitous companies having carrot-and-stick internal mechanisms feel deprived, hurt and even surprised when the market gets wise to their standards. “Value”, to these companies, is coined as a mere catchphrase, while inwardly value is correlated solely and improperly, to profit margin. Value to this type of company becomes that which profits them and not their customer. This modus operandi is a fatal mistake. Quite often these same types of companies endeavor to wound their competition and even their own ranks via low-road tactics of negative energy with the believe that such tactics are an acceptable inevitability in today’s Darwinian marketplace. They believe their company will necessarily posture upwards and reap a proportionately higher margin, proportionate to the “battle blow”. This assumption is skewed and more often than not, boomerangs.

Companies whose focus is wounding competition through low road tactics seldom have or exert the positive energy values and disciplines required for optimizing product value and optimizing customer satisfaction, since it is logical that a company cannot radiate both substantial negative and positive energies from the source hub (soul) of its business. This is not to imply that merely “positive” companies have any edge whatsoever over their competition or possess the requisite other requirements for optimizing product value and becoming a business success, however, positive companies who create trust, vision and respect within the ranks create a breeding environment for true vision, creativity and solution-scores and this is the roadway to modern success.

On an ironic yet positive note, wounding, be it self-inflicted or imposed from without, can help build strong muscles and healthy teeth when learned from and built upon. However, in order to bounce back and achieve growth potential from a state of having been wounded, companies should examine the wound, distill the most comprehensive and relevant lessons from the wound and reposition their perspective accordingly to become increasingly attentive, agile, attuned to and yes, respectful of the market. The greatest challenge a company faces today, online or otherwise, is how to maintain and keep their 3 Vs edge. There are no schools one can graduate from that offer a built in business-success guarantee and the playing field changes daily. Increasingly, and particularly within the arena of online business although applicable to all business, all but the adept and agile early adapters are being filtered by default out of the pack. This means, quite obviously, that possessing traits inherent of adept and agile early adapters and having the ability, although such “ability” is eerily akin to innate talent, of being able to separate the requisite wheat from the quicksand of costly defeatist chaff is the likely mark of a valid competitor. Stated another way, it means knowing what the required tools are, acquiring those tools and using those tools with surgical deftness to carve your niche in the block of success. The business road is littered with legitimate billion-dollar businesses that have gone belly-up overnight. Entrepreneur, small business owner and Fortune 500 CEO, dwell on this fact for a moment. If a billion-dollar corporation with mind-boggling market share can lose their footing and go belly-up overnight, due to the emergence of a “unforeseen” paradigm shift – who’s to say it can’t happen to you? Think smart, think fast, or forfeit the game. I will also add it’s to your advantage to play fair.

Finally, begs the question: Does the consumer of the end-product really care what goes on behind the battle lines of business? Does the consumer lay awake at night, losing sleep over visions about who is wounding who, who is being wounded or how they are being wounded and do they care in the slightest about listening to those great recover-from-wound stories told by emotionally-charged CEOs over candle-lit dinners? The answer to this is no. Customers are solely focused on obtaining the most value for the most minimal investment, with the exception that, with the product being substantially equal, customers will buy from those they like the most. In fact, even if your product is slightly inferior in quality than the competition, your dedicated base will tend to opt for yours, so chalk one up for Viability.  In light of this fact, it’s wise for all businesses to sit up and take note.

If you already have an online business, your business domain name is the first “image” that pops into your market’s mind (existing and potential customers) when they think of your business. This effect activates by default and is especially true for your potential market, since they do not have the relationship gauge as do your existing customers. Although your existing customers have the relationship gauge, they also, like your potential customers, automatically and immediately “feel” the effect of your domain name “word” produced by this word-image association. Also, like yourself, your market (customers and potential customers) inherently prefer to identify with catchy domain names that bespeak intelligence of construction. As for generic domain names (an actual dictionary word), the majority of generic domain names are either already bought or are outrageously priced if and when they are offered for sale. Also, generic domain names carry neither a guarantee of online business success or the special “sparkle” and traffic-magnet appeal that other “non-word” or hardly known dictionary names may offer. Consider the domain names “Google” and “Yahoo!” and the success of the businesses behind them. Google and Yahoo are actually dictionary names but were hardly known and seldom used. “Exxon” is an example of a coined or non-word. Many other businesses have proven that a “non-word” or hardly-known word can be a more powerful tool than a generic name in establishing a successful online business niche presence, when it works to invoke that special “word-image association” or comes to be associated with a strong business effect.  But one must always remember that a domain name is only as successful as the capital force behind it. Many start-ups and online businesses ignore this special phenomenon,  choose blander names that fail to “connect” on the subliminal level, and thus may be sacrificing significant profit solely by virtue of their domain name. Some online businesses feel compelled and even forced to “stick” with their current domain name even if it doesn’t feel right, and are wary of changing their established domain name due to tenure, customer-base association and the thought of “sacrificing” formerly spent marketing capital on past marketing-campaigns and when considering the possible forfeiture of their currently established position within the rankings and search engine crawlers. So they choose not to change out of fear, retain the same dull domain name and ache when they don’t see profits. Granted, domain name change for a newer online business is less painful and less costly proportionate to online tenure and marketing capital spent on advertising the old name. What’s the moral of this message? We’ll let you figure that out. Let your gut be your guide. If your online business name doesn’t “feel right” to you, the business owner, chances are it doesn’t feel right to your market and your intuition is trying to tell you something. In any event, if you do make the decision to change your online business name, one thing is for certain – changing it sooner is better than later. At ComCrown.com, we firmly believe that the first domain name you buy should be good enough to be your last, and that’s why we build our names with that genius in mind, at no additional cost to you.

Repeat after me: M-E-M-O-R-Y. Guess what? It’s dirt cheap now (Guess what? you can grab it off Ebay at 50% off retail with 3 clicks of a mouse and probably buy enough to MAX your system completely out (4 GB or so) for around a hundred bucks!). So forgo those two pricey dinners, max out your computer with memory and try that culprit software again. Who knows, this time it just might act right.

A tip to save $$$: When you purchase a NEW COMPUTER from a computer company, DO NOT PURCHASE THE upgrade memory from the company at the point of sale because they will STICK it to you pricewise! It’s called “cross-selling” and for many major corporations it’s the last bastion of squeezing every penny they can out of the customer. Don’t fall prey to this tactic! If you have time to do the upgrade yourself, then take a deep breath and elect the lowest memory amount offered by default from the company that comes standard with the Model, keeping in mind that all computers nowadays should be upgradable to AT LEAST 4 GB. If you’re thinking of buying a NEW computer that is NOT upgradable to 4GB of memory, I would suggest you reconsider your purchase and opt for a computer that is. When you get your new computer, (assuming you can perform basic tasks like turning a No.1 Phillips screwdriver or having someone skilled in that department do it for you), review your new computer manual under the heading of “Memory..upgrading, installing, etc”. The manual should specify and most of them will literally draw you a picture of where your memory expansion slots are. Once you have found out where the memory goes and how much memory your computer will handle (again, the manual should spell out the total allowable memory), simply cruise over to Ebay and put in a search string something like “(your exact computer brand name and model) + memory” then click search. Find yourself a reputable seller with reasonably high-volume sales and feedback preferably over the 95% range and buy your memory cards from them. CAUTION: Double check the auction site to make SURE your model is listed as being compatible with the memory you’re about to buy. Buying computer memory from Ebay will literally save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars and installing it yourself is a breeze. In most newer models you simply follow the instructions in your new manual for how to install new memory, which most of the time is something like – POWER DOWN the computer, REMOVE any supplemental batteries on laptops just to be on the safe side, open the memory compartment CAREFULLY, unsnap the side clips and gently remove the old memory – installation is the reverse of this process. You hold the memory with your fingers on each side of it and gently “seat” it in the proper place, then make sure the clips are snapped back in place. When you get your new memory in the mail be CAREFUL with it – do NOT touch the GOLD part, WEAR rubber-soled shoes to ground yourself and PAY ATTENTION to what you are doing. Keep the memory you remove in a relatively airtight container (a zip-lock baggie does nicely). Once you have the new memory installed and your system is now MAXED out with memory, snap the battery in (if you have an external battery on a laptop and cut the computer on. If your new memory is properly SEATED, the computer should recognize the upgrade and “adapt” itself to the change. It may send you a screen message to this effect or prompt you to hit a key to say “yes”..it’s that simple. When your computer is running with maxed out memory (like 4 GB for example) you will be amazed at the increased performance and will discover that it wasn’t the programs after all that were faulty – it was simply the lack of memory (and processor strength) to drive them. Congratulations, you’ve just saved yourself a thousand or two thousand dollars and best of all, you did it yourself! Installing memory is a SIMPLE task that every serious computer owner should BE ABLE TO DO because it takes NO SKILL at all!…Here’s to maxed out computers and happy trouble-free computing software. (Ok, let’s face it, there are a few buggy programs out there that wouldn’t give you the time of day if you had a terabyte of memory paired with the newest Dual-Core, but we won’t name names – in this post anyway.)

What’s the moral of the story of Business ABC? Simple. Before you cave and pay Business ABC the 1K,  just stop a minute, take a deep breath and click on JOEL COMM’s LINK HERE, then go on over to Amazon.com and buy The Adsense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with Adsense, By Joel Comm. SUPER-TIP WORTH THOUSANDS: If you go to Joel’s website and buy the Adsense Code for retail on Amazon (about $16.00) Joel throws in TONS of great BONUSES FOR FREE! REALLY! Then sit yourself down, maybe take a bubble bath or recline in your favorite chair and begin reading the book with a pen handy (and sticky notes if you’re a sticky note person) for outlining and to mark the myriad of sweet spots that exist throughout. THEN, implement ONE tweak to your website (the first tweak should logically be using the FREE GOOGLE TRACKING TOOL which is as simple as a copy-paste one liner in your hoe page), then do a SECOND TWEAK and so on. Don’t burn yourself out but play around with it and commit to at least one tweak per week. YOU DISAGREE? You would rather pay the 1K and let the “other guys” do the work for you?

Anyone online business person who has not read The Adsense Code: What Google Never Told You about Making Money with Adsense, By Joel Comm, is probably missing out on at least several, if not hundreds of marketing tweaks which are CRITICAL to your online success IF you have determined it is to your businesses’ ultimate advantage to play ball with Google. You can buy the book directly on Amazon or even on Ebay but why not cash in on all those great BONUSES Joel offers for free and click on the link above as I suggested. Consider this tip as 1K SAVED!

Roboform

Don’t let the compact size of this inexpensive “password manager” fool you. It is the hardiest password-storage tool on the market today, super-user-friendly, awesomely stable, CONSTANTLY UPDATED, super-versatile and SUPER-SECURE, offering various types of encryptions for your constant online and offline protection. Once you get the hang of it, which is so easy because once properly configured, Roboform offers to do the work for you, those gruesome days of recalling (forgetting) and hand-typing in again and again your passwords are OVER and with Roboform you can gain entrance into your multiple password protected sites fast as a blink on perfect autopilot. For the very small price of the Pro Version of RoboForm, around $30.00, which includes lifetime updates, you will thank yourself a million times over you invested in this magnificent FIVE-STAR SOFTWARE. Trust us. This is state-of-the-art stuff. PS: The Roboform people also offer GoodSync, a GREAT BRAND NEW database sync tool which has itself too, just been recently upgraded and it gives excellent quick results. The nice folks at Roboform offer free lifetime upgrades, not only with Roboform but also with GoodSync. I highly recommend that you treat yourself to the good life and quickly purchase the pair before the developers change their mind and justifiably up the price.

A Brief Review on Free Domain Name Appraisal Engines

Why do we suggest these links? Because they’re free, for one. Also, we, like many others out there, are grateful that several enterprising souls have taken upon themselves the arduous task of working up a (free) indexer with at least the intent of suggesting value. All free domain name appraisal engines have at least one thing in common – they tend to produce a wide variety of “money values” based on different modes of analysis using a fixed and limited set of criteria. Values that pop up on the free appraisal websites do not purport to be actual indicators of true market value and rightly so. However the values are at least interesting, albeit oftentimes arbitrary, and at most may assist in developing an overall strategy of determining potential market value or establishing a working minimum-maximum sell price for those sellers with limited funds or who are unwilling to “invest” in paying substantially large amounts of money for a “certified” appraisal. It seems to be a general consensus that market demand determines and drives the value of every commodity, including domain names. It appears that the innate attraction of particular domain name seems to be initiated primarily within the subconscious level and radiates its way outward into the form of a purchase. It is a reasonable expectation that top level domain names will continue to rise in value and as such, the search for attractive domain names should continue to be a rewarding venture.

Legal Implications: Just What IS a Domain Name?

Although the United States appellate authority suggests that a domain name is a form of intangible intellectual property, it has also been suggested, although this suggestion is not judicially clear or consistent, that a domain name is not property but rather a contractual right. The jury is still out on this point which instills hope that even greater values, similar to real estate, may be attributed to domain names as the law continues to work through cases and hone its view as to their legal substance.

Several Free Appraisal Engines Worth Looking At

NameBoy : NameBoy used to charge $10 per appraisal. Currently they’re offering unlimited free appraisals, so we suggest that if you want your ego supercharged, that you jump on the bandwagon and bulk load your names up for what promises to be a very “healthy” list of appraisals you will immediately wish could be cashed in like currency. Our experience with NameBoy valuations is that they tend to the very high side and we would like to understand further the indexing criteria they use in order to arrive at these figures. Hats off to NameBoy for offering the public free appraisals with the additional benefit of bulk-name uploading and prompt individual appraisal responses. Even if their numbers can be superficially high based on current market value, it’s still a pleasant experience to see it in writing.

Estibot

Estibot in certain circles is considered the “bible” of free appraisal engines and the engine that most closely simulates true market value. The good news is that Estibot currently touts a “new and improved” upcoming release which they claim will ‘revolutionize’ the appraisal system which may lead to even more realistic results. Currently, Estibot offers unlimited free appraisals which, in our opinion, have historically drifted in consistency, possibly in part because they seem to be tied into Overture for some of their indexing, whereas Estibot tells us on their website that Overture has currently been “down” and admits their results may not be as “accurate” as a result. Our experience with Estibot values is, like all free appraisal systems, they seem to rely solely on automated limited indexers and tend toward the low or medium range. A strange phenomenon occurs often with users of Estibot which seldom occurs with the others – that of reliance. Estibot seems to be more conservative in their indexing but at the same time their indexers appear to be broader in scope which lends credence to the common-place conclusion that Estibot appraisals can quite often hit the mark right on relative to predicting true market value. This ability to more closely predict sales results in the real world of auctions or buy-it-now scenarios in our opinion gives Estibot an extra dimension of credibility based on performance although this is not to imply one should entirely rely on the Estibot numbers alone, for like all free automated searchers, none of them can truly predict what the free human spirit will deem of value and up-bid on and this is the most exciting part.

Summarily, we feel that any free appraisal system is prone to arbitrary production of arbitrary values spanning the low to high and should never be relied upon as the final judge of market value of a domain name, ESPECIALLY with arbitrary domain names which possess their own “secretive” value based on unknown appeal factors which are virtually measureless and therefore impossible to predict, to wit: who would have placed a value of THREE HUNDRED TWENTY SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS (considering traffic) on an arbitrary name such as Google, twenty years ago? Estibot just appraised Google for me several seconds ago and provided this amount. Minus the traffic of Google, Estibot places the value of the domain name alone (keep in mind the name is arbitrary) at $730,000.00. What’s the moral of this story? It’s twofold. Traffic is one index used by free search engines to determine value and so an arbitrary domain name void of traffic, although generating 0 traffic, may ultimately rise fast in value if it finds, of course, the right “home” and is market-groomed correctly to draw traffic.

Leapfish

I like LeapFish and I really don’t know why. I like the format and the occasional surprises in value that lead me to suspect there may be more to a name than the other engines are telling me. Leapfish offers unlimited free appraisals which predominantly tend toward the much lower side which we feel is based on limited indexers. It has been our experience that Leapfish and Estibot agree within reason about 10-20% percent of time, depending on the type of the name, however they disagree 80-90%. This inconsistency seems to be one of indexing features. Nevertheless we enjoy the dual rides and are quick to not hang our hat on either.

Conclusion About Free Appraisal Systems and Determining Market Values

As with all the FREE APPRAISAL systems out there, (and there are not that many) our best advice is just enjoy them for what they are but do not rely on them as indicators of “true market value”. Real sale prices are the general indictor of immediate worth. Do your own serious homework based on what the market is actually paying. One way to gain perspective on true market value is applying the basic common-sense fundamentals and checking out sales prices at auctions and names that create frenzy bidding. Also, keep in mind that even application of common-sense fundamentals can NOT predict the value of arbitrary domain names and that not all auction-end prices and/or “public sales” reflect “true market value” as both may be misleading and inflated for a number of reasons including but not limited to the integrity of the bidding, false rises due to irrational bidding frenzies and the like.

Final Word: Hold or Sell?

For those who demonstrate patience and diligent watch of the market, time may be on the side of increased domain name values. If you’re in a hurry to make a big profit on domain names, perhaps its time to relax and re-examine your game plan. You may want to consider holding on to your domain names for a period of time, even years, as you monitor market values and (likely) witness values rise. Write off the bad names and dump them for a song, absorbing the lesson of not buying anything that sounds like that again! Don’t be in a big hurry to sell your best names, because given time and the depleted market choice, exponential returns may be looming on the horizon for a few smart investors who can think ahead to meet the changing times and choose their names accordingly. In conclusion, don’t be anxious or unrealistic and stay in sync with the market trends.

More Coming Soon on Solutions to Determing Price and Auctions…

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